Caroline Humphrey founded the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit together with Urgunge Onon and she was the Director until 2001. She is the Sigrid Rausing Professor of Collaborative Anthropology at the Department of Social Anthropology, a fellow of the British Academy, and a fellow of King's College. Her first research was in Buryatia in the 1960s-70s. This resulted in a Ph.D. thesis entitled "Magical Drawings in the Religion of the Buryat" and a book on life in Buryat collective farms. Caroline then did an M.A. in Mongolian Studies at Leeds University under Owen Lattimore and she carried out fieldwork in Mongolia several times during the 1970s.

After further field research on pastoralism and trade in North-Eastern Nepal, she then embarked on a project on the religion and rituals of the Jains of Rajasthan in Western India. Returning to work on Inner Asia, Caroline was advisor for a documentary film on yak-herders in Tuva and she made further visits to Buryatia and Mongolia. Together with Urgunge Onon she did extended work on the shamanism of the Daurs and this resulted in her first visit to Inner Mongolia (1988). In the early 1990s, with David Sneath, Hürelbaatar, Balzhan Zhimbiev and numerous other colleagues from Inner Asia, she organised the interdisciplinary and international project on "Environmental and Cultural Conservation in Inner Asia", funded by the MacArthur Foundation (Chicago). This was a broad comparative study of the effects of different systems of managing pastoral economies in Russia, Mongolia and China.

Subsequently, Caroline has worked mainly in Inner Mongolia on the politics on the landscape and in Russia on diverse themes of post-socialist social and economic transformations. She is Co-editor of the journal Inner Asia and an editor of the Inner Asia Monograph series. She has written and edited several books and numerous articles.

List of publications

C.V.